In May, the EPA closed loopholes at oil refineries which allowed Clean Air Act exemptions during start up, shut down or malfunction. Coincidentally (or not), the American Petroleum Institute recently launched a new primetime ad implying that they’re too strapped for cash to clean up pollution. But facts from the Moms Clean Air Force, which just launched a Clean Air for Kids petition, puts that in perspective: Big Oil is drowning Congress in lobbying money. [Read more…]

A few years ago, a friend forwarded me a picture of Alicia Silverstone. The subject line was simple: body by vegan.

It got my attention. Because even though I try to exercise two or three times a week, there remains that stubborn five pounds of fat that took hold right below my belly button while I was pregnant and never came off.

Now I know that I’m active and healthy, and I knock wood daily for that. But there is a vain teenager inside of every woman. And on the day that my friend sent me Alicia Silverstone’s picture, that teen spoke up. I wanted to have a body by vegan. Desperately.

The photo-sending friend happens to be a vegan, mind you. And she also happens to be very thin, which may have less to do with the fact that she doesn’t eat animal products, and more to do with the fact that when you don’t eat animal products there is really very little that you can eat. Why live like that? [Read more…]

There’s nothing Southern California weather, with its nearly 300 days of sunshine. But here’s one teensy-tiny drawback to the cloudless skies and general lack of atmospheric commotion: The clearer and calmer the weather, the more we Angelenos hear the freeway. And the more we think about air pollution.

Now, some people aren’t bothered by the sound of the freeway. I have a friend who claims to simply imagine that she lives closer to the beach and is hearing the distant sound of crashing waves. She says the constant flow of freeway traffic noise is easily tuned out.

Except I can’t tune it out. I obsess over it. To me, the freeway noise that’s somehow magnified by the alley that runs alongside our back garden is the one significant flaw of my otherwise perfectly lovely house. It’s the reason I don’t like to sit outside in the back yard. It’s why I worry about contamination of the vegetables that we grow, and encourage my kids to play in front of the house.